flexible-raiding
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Flexible Raiding lockouts and queues clarified
As with any new feature, confusion abounds around Flexible Raiding and just how it will work. Blizzard Community Manager Taepsilum took to the forums to clarify various aspects, including lockouts. Taepsilum Right now, the idea is to have FR lockouts work very similarly to lockouts in LFR. You will be able to repeat bosses, and that will actually still be somewhat rewarding, you'll be able to use additional bonus rolls, earn Valor Points, and potentially loot some shinnies from trash... There's something unique about FRs though, I'll explain it with an example: Let's say you join a 12man and kill the first boss, leave the raid, and join a 20man, you might have to repeat the first boss. "Might", so how does that work? If everyone in the new 20man raid has already killed the first boss just like you did, then that boss will not spawn. But even if only 1 of the players in that 20man has not killed the first boss, he will spawn again and everyone else will have to repeat the encounter. source This is all pretty confusing stuff! WoW Insider reached out to Blizzard for some additional clarity on just how the raid lockouts will work, and they came back with some more information.
WoW Insider Round Table 3: Flexible raiding and its impact on WoW
Welcome back to episode three of the WoW Insider Round Table! This week, we had Olivia Grace, Dawn Moore, Matt Low and Sarah Pine, and new panelist Joe Perez, and our topic of discussion was, inevitably, flexible raiding. We started off, selfishly, by giving our own opinions, the panel runs teh gamut from the hardcore end to the casual, so we had most perspectives covered. We discussed whether this would cause or contribute to burnout among hardcore raiders, as well as wondering what the impact on casual guilds would be. We then moved on to consider the new tier's impact on the Raid Finder, whether players would choose to run this new content instead of the Raid Finder, particularly tanks, and while the panel concluded that a good number of them would, they were fairly sure that, while queue times were likely to increase, the Raid Finder would not die an untimely death. As far as other considerations for the new raid system, the panel discussed some of the issues inherent with flexible raid sizes, particularly the numbers and how abilities would scale, before moving on to talk about the looting system chosen -- the same as the system for Raid Finder. We concluded, just as we began, that this was a system that would have a positive impact, far more so than the Raid Finder. One panelist even asserted that this was what they always should have done, instead of LFR. We hope you enjoyed this panel, and if you have any ideas for future topics, do let us know!
Officers' Quarters: Flexible raiding and you
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. Just when I think I have Blizzard figured out, they throw us a curveball. Only a month ago, I made the case on the Starting Zone podcast that raiding had evolved into three difficulty levels, and those levels could be compared to the easy, normal, and hard modes that most single-player games offer. I wrote in a column that normal mode raiding should now be labeled "guild raiding," because it took a certain level of coordination to succeed at that level. Normal raiding is no longer PUG friendly. I said on the podcast that Blizzard is still figuring out just where the difficulty of normal modes should lie on the curve. It seemed that once their encounter designers figured out the appropriate tuning for the three modes, that is what raiding would look like for all foreseeable upcoming tiers and expansions. As it turned out, Blizzard had a new raiding system hidden up their sleeve the entire time -- a system that few could have predicted. Let's look at the potential impact of this new way to raid and how your guild might need to adjust.
On raid lockouts, flexible raiding, and choice
With the introduction of flexible raiding a certain conversation is cropping up again. It's a conversation about raid lockouts. Back when LFR was first introduced during Dragon Soul, quite a few players began to argue that they felt forced to run LFR in addition to the raid itself. Then, as we moved into Mists of Pandaria raiding, this discussion intensified. I had my own opinion on the issue, which was basically that no, raid finder should not share a lockout with normal mode raiding. Luckily, Blizzard didn't do that, coming up with other ways to reduce LFR's desirability for people who run normal/heroic raids. Now, with flexible raiding, the argument that it should share a lockout with normal/heroic raids is being resurrected because again players are afraid they will be forced to run it. I'm opposed to this idea for a variety of reasons. Sharing the lockout between flexible raiding and normal/heroic raiding means that if you choose to step down to flex for a night because you were short people, you'll either be locked into flex or you'll need to be able to switch back and forth between them. Either players will be punished for going flex, or they'll be using it to bypass encounters that are 'too hard' on normal. This isn't meant to be a means to game raid difficulty. Sharing the lockout between 10 and 25 man raiding nearly killed 25 man raiding. A shared lockout between flexible raiding and normal raids would probably be enough to finish the job, because as 25 man guilds lost members and made use of the flexible raid to keep running, there would be very little incentive to recruit and less incentive for new players to join. Flex raiding is being rolled out to test the waters - we have no idea how the final implementation will shake out. Burdening it with a shared lockout adds a further complication which isn't needed at this time. For all we know, flexible raiding will be how all raids work in the next expansion. Even if it isn't, we need to give it time before we make it jump through more hoops. People need to stop begging Blizzard to keep them from playing the game. Number five is probably the most controversial point, and it's also the most important to my eyes. I don't know where certain players came up with this idea that Blizzard needs to save them from doing things but it needs to stop. If you're not in a guild that's pushing content in the first week or two of its existence, you will not need to run flexible raids for gear to push that content faster any more than you need to run LFR for that.
Flexible Raids come to World of Warcraft with patch 5.4
In the olden days of World of Warcraft, it took 40 dedicated people to down some of the game's toughest content. It wasn't easy to keep a guild stocked with the necessary number of people to make these raids possible, and Blizzard reduced raid sizes to 10- and 25-man encounters starting with the Burning Crusade expansion in the hopes of making raiding more accessible for smaller guilds and raid leaders working with busy real-life humans. It is with this same accessibility in mind that Blizzard has just announced Flexible Raids, a new form of raid content that will debut with the game's upcoming 5.4 patch. In the simplest terms, these raids automatically adjust their difficulty based on how many players are present, supporting any number between 10 and 25. The difficulty resets week-to-week; if 22 people come one week and 13 the next, the new raiders won't be locked into last week's numbers. A new tier of item that falls between the Raid Finder and Normal difficulties is being introduced for Flexible Raiders, and Flexible Raid lockouts will be separate from those of Normal and Heroic attempts. Blizzard has also promised additional rewards for those who participate in Flexible, Normal, and Heroic raids -- rewards that will be unavailable to Raid Finder groups. Flexible Raiding will be made available piece by piece as Blizzard tweaks the formula. It should be launching on the test realm Soon™.
